Sunday, November 23, 2008

Why I hate cool and ironic

The infuriating thing is that the BBC can be both so good and so bad within a very short space of time. On Saturday's CD Review on Radio 3 Jonathan Swain reminded us just how good the BBC can be. His review of the available recordings of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Job - A Masque For Dancing was a textbook example of informed and intelligent radio. His advocacy of the work was so powerful that I listened again to Tod Handley's 1984 LP of this overlooked masterpiece as soon as the programme finished.

The bad thing is that Jonathan Swain, and several other excellent presenters, have been sidelined to specialist review and overnight programmes as Radio 3 continues to trade excellence for access. Clearly BBC director general Mark Thompson never listened to Russell Brand on Radio 2. I also suspect that Radio 3 controller Roger Wright doesn't spend enough time listening to his own station's output.

Jonathan Swain's passionate case for Job was a million miles from the cool and ironic style loved by the New York in-crowd. If I need reminding why I hate cool and ironic I will return to Sequenza21's recent interview with composer Rodney Lister and his comments about Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony.

Vernon Handley's Job is available as an EMI CD. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Interestingly, the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra performed Job just last week (November 18th) and received amazing reviews. What is really interesting about this is that the orchestra consists of players from the "back desks" of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, students from the music program at the University of Ottawa, and amatuers! A difficult score pulled off with great aplomb, which is actually typical of this orchestra.

Well, first of all I don't live in New York, and if I'm in-crowd it's news to me. If I were I'd probably get my music played more. (Sorry, is that a cool and ironic thing to say?)

I did, after all, say that I loved the Sea Symphony, which is true. I'm not sure that I'd characterize my comment as ironic, and, although coolness is in the eye of the beholder, I've never been aware of being considered such by anybody. That you do is a compliment.

Well, the sentence before the one you quote says "I love the Vaughan williams Sea Symphony." I'm not sure how difficult it is to decode that.

Perhaps you missed a rather long posting I did after the all Vaughan Williams Proms, which talked about the 9th Symphony at length, and, at least I think, unambiguously admiring and respectful. (Although I have to admit not to having the same admiration about the Piano Concerto and the 6th Symphony) which I also wrote about before then.